The invention relates to a sprinkler system with a sprinkler arm, swivellable in a horizontal angle region about an essentially vertical axis, from which a water jet emerges at the front.
Such sprinkler system are in particular for use in plant cultures.
Such sprinkler systems are already known and are already used in practice, wherein a spooler often retracts a moveable sprinkler trolley via a water hose, on which for its part the sprinkler arm is swivellably housed. In addition, the international patent application WO00/13486 shows such a sprinkler system. With such systems, the sprinkler trolley with the hose is extended, for example with the help of a tractor, the water hose being wound by the spooler. In actual operation, the spooler then retracts the sprinkler trolley on the hose to itself, a sprinkler arm, turning left and right, irrigating a prespecified sector by means of a water jet emerging from the sprinkler arm. A jet interrupter can be provided at the free end of the sprinkler arm, which alternately engages with the water jet and fans it out resulting in a “water curtain” irrigating essentially the whole sector. The jet interrupter can also adopt the function of a jet diversion, the torque produced thereby being able to be used to swivel the sprinkler arm by a horizontal angle about a vertical axis. There is therefore no need for a separate drive for this horizontal movement over the irrigation sector. Rather the water energy can be used for this.
Older variants of such irrigation systems are very inflexible in operation. At most, they allow only a basic setting, i.e. that the sprinkler arm sweeps a single predefined sector. Although an adjustment is possible, it is relatively time-consuming and was often carried out by users with the sprinkler switched on, which represents a great danger in view of the high-pressure water jet. Such an adjustment is for example necessary if a road which must not be sprinkled passes the end of the site to be sprinkled. Then the sprinkling sector must be aligned for example semicircular to the spooler. After a specific retraction distance, an adjustment is then necessary by means of which the sprinkling sector is changed such that it faces away from the spooler.
The above-mentioned WO00/13486 already shows a sprinkler system in which the sector swept by the sprinkler arm can be changed during retraction by means of the spooler, i.e. during irrigation, without manual intervention. However, the construction there is very expensive and still inflexible. Turning points must be defined with mechanical pins which can be secured to a plate, each of which points defines the end of a sector. Each of these sectors defined by mechanical end points can then be selected via a control system.
In addition, there is also the option of swivelling the sprinkler arm about a fixed axis or of housing it at the end of a large rotatable irrigation arm.